BLOG: X-FAB Sponsored Design Challenge is in the Books

Our first customer sponsored design challenge is in the books! It was a lot of hard work by the Efabless team and by all of you. It was also a big success.

Before I go any further, I want to say a few thank you’s. X-FAB took the important first step and sponsored the challenge as our first design request customer. They have been a great partner since our inception. Our gratitude to the entire executive team, with special thanks to Ulrich Bretthauer, X-FAB’s manager of Industrial & Medical Solutions. We also want to thank the open source software and hardware community and Symica for their support. Last, but not least, a very special thanks to all of you for your participation and for your patience and assistance as we worked through the bumps and bruises that come with the introduction of a brand-new concept – community engineering. I hesitate to single out any one of you, but I cannot help but note the unique contributions of Sherif Eid. Sherif was with Efabless in the beginning and remains a very engaged community member. He has helped us with beta and even alphas of functionality and his many suggestions and contributions are always valuable.

Three finalist designs made it through layout and received cash prizes. Congratulations to Rishi Raghav, Arsalan Jawed and Ibrahim Muhammed. Well done. We also want to extend our congratulations to Taher Kotb, Arthur Campos de Oliveira and Mohamed Khairy, each of whom submitted schematic designs that met the X-FAB design spec. These and other designs are also very interesting and we hope to see them in the marketplace. Speaking of marketplace, please visit the latest version. I think that you will like it. It provides a searchable platform to feature community IP, and also community member skills, areas of expertise and proven accomplishments on our platform. These features are foundational to our offering of on-demand IP. Customers can sample and simulate community member IP with our try-before-buying capability and engage designers to customize the IP to meet their needs. In all cases, community members are in control of the pricing of their IP and IP cannot be downloaded from the platform without their and the X-FAB’s express permission.

Please spread the word to your friends and colleagues. Also, stay tuned for additional functionality in the weeks ahead.